What can I do to practice and improve my design presentation skills?
Presentation is an important skill for any professional designer as it’s how we explain our process to colleagues, convey ideas to clients, and ultimately get buy-in for our design decisions.
Although Designlab is an entirely online experience, we have built in many opportunities to develop your presentation skills both during short courses and in UX Academy.
Above all, we’d encourage you to use the calls with your mentor to make short presentations about your work. This can be as straightforward as having your work ready to screen-share, and jotting down some bullet points about things you’d like to show and discuss.
Alternatively, you could put together brief slide decks using a tools like Google Slides or Keynote so that you can really explain your process and get some practice for how you might present design work in a professional setting. Remember that your mentor can also offer feedback on your presentation style—just ask!
In UX Academy, we require all students to attend “Group Crits”, which are facilitated design critique sessions attended by small groups of UX Academy students and graduates.
These sessions are an opportunity to practice presenting work and listening to feedback in a peer-to-peer setting. Ideally, it mimics the kind of “design crit” you would experience working in a professional design studio. Importantly, it’s also a chance for you to practice giving feedback to others—another essential skill. (For more about this, see our blog article on giving effective critique.)
UX Academy graduates mention that they were initially apprehensive about the idea of attending Group Crits—but it turned out to be one of the most valuable aspects of their course experience.
Remember: presentation and feedback have the power to rapidly influence and transform your work for the better—take full advantage!